A fascinating aspect of their work is how Craig's team devise a way to figure out which gene is good for life and which one it is not. Mostly by knocking them one by one and finding out which ones allow the cell to survive. This looks like a combinatorial approach. Maybe a group testing approach ( connected to comprressive sensing) might help. At about 38 minutes, he also makes the case that much of the genome is oversampled so that a specific capacity can be replaced by a different set of genes.

I note that his team uses a mix of previous and the new PacBio long read technology.

It was in the video we mentioned back in 2012 that sometimes a 1 base pair means the difference between life and death of the cell. There may be redundancy at the gene level but a one base pair difference between life and death point to other issues.

From an engineering standpoint, I note that the optics of the Illumina had to be reframed after the road trip (at 58 minutes).